European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

266 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYthe incapacity of the West to open itself up to other cultures andpropagated by Yalal al-Hamad, author of the work “Oextosicación”, awork that was held in high regard by the youth of the 60s and 70s, arecase in point.Terms like “world arrogance” or “the great Satan” to refer to aparadigm of evil, especially to North America, came as a response tothe scorn that the West had demonstrated towards the Muslim Worldand the Islamists.The insistence throughout history on highlighting the differencesbetween the Islamic world and the West explains the Jomeini’s motto“neither the Orient nor the Occident.”The ambivalence towards this situation became manifest in thatwhereas the political discourse reproached the West, in practice therewas a fascination for anything scientific and that represented progress.This was even more obvious when one considers the social importancethat the political offices held by engineers and diplomats from Westernschools, “the Islamist engineers”, acquired in some Islamic countries 24 .Moreover, the Iranian revolution itself did not mean the rejection of theintroduction of Western ideas and technology, but rather the integration,not the mere importation, of formulas into a living culture 25 by adaptingnew instruments to old behaviours and generating a progressiveassimilation of them. Moreover, the ruling class itself, even the mostimportant religious education centres like the School of Qom, did nothesitate to quickly participate in the computer science revolution.Occidentology and the Proposal for DialogueThe desire to find an original formula that could combinemodernity and tradition has led to a process of Islamic culturalaffirmation among its societies, a process which is allowing them torecover some of the values that had been rejected since the emergenceof European colonization and to adapt them to the new sociopoliticalrealities. Two important processes have favoured this recovery, whichdid not consist of a return to tradition, but rather of a new interpretation—starting with reason— of the original texts.24Hourcade, B. & Y. Richard, (eds.) (1987)Téheran au-dessous du volcan. Paris,Autrement, pp. 24-28.25Richard, Y. (dir) (1989) Entre l’Iran et l’Occident. Adaptation et assimilation desidées et techniques occidentals en Iran. Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences del’Homme.